Pak DG's fake vid shows IND admit to post-Balakot loss

The Director-General of Pakistan's Inter-Services Public Relations Major General Asif Ghafoor on Sunday took to Twitter to post a doctored video of retired decorated Indian Air Force veteran Air Marshal Denzil Keelor in the context of the post-Balakot dogfight between India and Pakistan that ensued on February 27 this year. The video, Ghafoor claimed, was the 'admission of Indian failure and losses on 27 February 2019.'

The video starts off with Air Marshal Keelor stating -- "Some of the things that happen are losses, for instance. During war, you win and you lose. Some of the losses were not right. They were due to tactical errors, due to inexperience and you can't go to war with this type of inexperience." The video ends with him saying -- "Firstly, it should have been made public. Because it gave a detailed account of the political failures, military leadership failures, tactical failures, strategic failures which led to this debacle. We all know it. I don't see any reason why people should be ashamed to show it."

The actual video, it turns out, was posted on Youtube on 9 August, 2015, three years before the Balakot airstrike, by a channel called WildFilmsIndia. In the video titled 'Nehru lost India the war: Air Marshal Denzil Keelor speaks about India's battle losses,' Air Marshal Keelor, a 1965 Indo-Pakistan war veteran, is seen talking about India's wars as a part of the channel's series on the 1962 and 1965 wars that India fought, according to the description of the video.

In the Twitter video posted by the Spokesperson of Pakistan Armed Forces on Sunday, Marshal Keelor further talks about how Pakistan had a radar system, an interception system, an air defence system with the ability to detect, identify, intercept and destroy and that we (India) didn't have it. He also mentions how it was an asymmetric situation where they (Pakistan) had a great advantage to be able to catch, identify and intercept Indian soldiers while the Indian soldiers had to just roam around as you see them with their eyes and take them on. These, he added, were the big factors which 'influenced the outcome of the war.. not the outcome, but the attrition that took place on our (India's) side which could have been much less.'

Within the video, there is an inset video with clips of the captured aircraft and Abhinandan Varthaman playing simultaneously to set the context straight. While the 2015 interview was 4 minutes 43 seconds long, the one posted by Ghafoor was a minute and 43 seconds long. The apparent jump cuts and the usage of only certain sections of the original interview weren't missed either.

Twitteratis were quick to point out that Ghafoor had posted a doctored by taking Marshal Keelor's 2015 interview completely out of context.

Indian Air Force fighter jets had targetted terror group JeM's training camp near Balakot in Pakistan on February 26, 12 days after the terror group claimed responsibility for a suicide attack on a CRPF convoy in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama in which 40 soldiers were killed.

On February 27, the Pakistan Army had captured Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman after his fighter jet crashed in an air duel with a Pakistani F-16, which he shot down before his own went down, forcing him to eject and fall into Pakistani territory. Varthaman was later released by the Pakistani Army on March 1.